If you're a classic Disney movie fan, and you get Turner Classic Movies on your cable/satellite provider, I got my TCM guide this past week, and on Sunday 12/21 they have several cartoons and movies from "The Disney Vault" that they will be showing, starting with a few classic short cartoons, and continuing with features such as "The Reluctant Dragon," early episodes of the "Disneyland" TV show, "Davy Crockett" and more.

Oooh, interesting! I guess it makes sense: what with Disney pretty much giving up on the home video market and making everything more and more available on download/streaming formats, they'll now start to release previously held back material to "regular" television in order to milk a little more returns on titles that otherwise have little monetary value nowadays.

Maybe TCM home video might license some good stuff to put out in some editions of their own? They already issue certain titles for Universal, Columbia/Sony and others.

Great! Too bad TCM UK is a bit of a shell of the US TCM...we don't get much of the classy programming you do and I doubt we'll get any Disney shows. The movies I can do without as I have them mostly on disc, but the original TV shows would be fantastic to have again, although at one five times a year I bet they focus on stuff that's already been remastered for disc already. Still would be terrific if they had the Disney blocks over here though...

I remember how AMC, American Movie Classics, used to be before they started transitioning to the post-1970s era cinema and began producing reality TV series and original drama like Mad Men and The Walking Dead. It's a night-and-day difference. AMC used to show a lot of classic B&W movies and more than a few short films -- including animated shorts. The programming was excellent if you were a pre-70's movie fan. I occasionally caught the likes of Betty Boop and The Little Rascals/Our Gang time and time again through the early 2000s. (The only thing they seem to show in B&W regularly now is The Three Stooges... that's literally it!) The same has been happening with FMC and TCM in the past few years but it's taking a bit longer than it did for AMC. B&W and classic pre-70s movies are becoming an endangered species all across cable TV. It's a darn shame!

I've seen probably more classic/Walt-era Disney movies on Hallmark Channel than any other cable channel in the last 5-8 years. Disney is not showing much of the pre-1980s live-action film catalog on the official Disney channels anymore, period. Of course, I haven't had cable TV for a while -- the quality of the programming dropped enough for me to stop bothering with it -- so I can't comment as much on the last 2 years. I used to watch a LOT of TV but when the programming became more reality TV-based and the same current 5-6 films got stripped 24/7 across 20-different PPV channels I lost interest and didn't want to pay for the pleasure of bad programming across 95%+ of the channels I paid for. (I think that figure used to be 75% trash! )

You can literally have 500 channels and there'll be nothing worth watching! It'd be a great laugh if it weren't so true a lot of the time. I would swear that the TV programming was better and there was more variety before we had 20+ channels available on cable TV! There were also a lot more independent TV channels/stations before the late 1980s as well. Most stations are affiliated with a network whether it's ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, or CW. The idea of a completely independent TV station with its own non-network programming in a major city is pretty much dead now. They're pretty much locked into national schedules with far fewer slots for unique or local programming. It's kinda sad that as things have gotten bigger the variety of what's available to see has actually shrunk...

Look what happened to the slots for animation in the US. Before the late 1990s, I would say there were upwards of at least a dozen channels that I'm aware in my area that were showing classic animated shorts and new syndicated programming at least once in the week for a few hours... The national networks have completely abandoned Saturday morning animated series and there's a lot less animated series being syndicated anywhere, period, whereas before they were guaranteed to show in the morning sometime before 6:30 AM and 9:00 AM and again between 3:00 PM and 5:00 PM on local non-affiliated channels... This is well before Cartoon Network became the ghetto for animation and we all know what happened to classic theatrical animation on CN, too. That got phased by new-production series on CN in the 2000s. Even Boomerang is pretty sad with the same 8-9 shows stripped all the time. The schedule doesn't get radically changed and rotated all that much.

Even over here the same can be said. There's also a very big gap for someone willing to pony up and put on a truly classic, pre-1980s movie channel that feeds on features and shorts, animation or otherwise...

Well, as bad as it is for classic live-action/B & W films it's by far worse for classic/theatrical animated shorts.

Even when Looney Tunes were being shown on Cartoon Network, it seemed like they were rotating the same 100 or so LT cartoons in and out of the schedule... and quite a few of them were censored, too. You'll never see most of the good WWII-era shorts on TV again let alone the short series with controversial characters like Inki and the Minah Bird (which I did see shorts of on TV through the late 1970s/early 1980s before they became too politically incorrect). It was the same deal with the black-and-white stuff, too. The same 100 or so got rotated regularly but they never showed anything new. Occasionally something like the Fleischer Superman cartoons or a B & W Popeye cartoon would be shown but I just never saw Betty Boop much anywhere on TV other than AMC a few times. (Okay, they may have shown 3 or 4 Betty Boop cartoons on CN but that was about it!) The last major B & W series push on Cartoon Network may have been the Popeye show that showcased restored Fleischer Popeye shorts. There hasn't been a show like that on CN since!

For that matter, there used to be around 4 cable channels that regularly showed animation as the main part of their programming. These were channels with unique programming and they didn't just strip the same 3 or shows all day long, either! A decade ago, around 4-5 channels were also showing anime regularly, too. Now we're down to three main venues that repeat the same programs over and over again -- Disney and its 2 main channels, Nickelodeon and its 2-3 offspring, Cartoon Network and Boomerang, and The Hub (which used to be Discovery Junior I think). The numbers today are deceptive -- it's the same programming scheduled for different time zones.

Right now, Tom & Jerry gets better promotion than Looney Tunes do... WB tries to do something new with the LT characters about every five years but I have noticed that they regularly push new Tom & Jerry TV series and movies all the time. They must be making enough money off of those characters that they don't have to stay corporate figureheads for any length of time (ex: Mickey and the fact that it took them forever to do anything new with the character; before that he was basically the 'hidden symbol' for Disney World.)

There are shorts that I can remember seeing on TV in the late 1970s that I never saw again until the early 1990s when they were released on home video. Seriously, any kid born after 1990 is will likely to have never seen many, if any, of the classic Tex Avery/MGM cartoons and the bulk of other studios' animated product from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Disney itself has basically restricted the classic animated shorts to home video releases. Honestly, they have those new Mickey Mouse shorts on the Internet but where are the original classics from the 1930s and 1940s? For that matter, during my childhood, Disney was not showing a lot of those animated shorts on TV, period...

Dunno what to say... From what I do recall from transcripts and synopses of home video releases, they had some very good home video producers in the 1990s and early 2000s who handled boxset releases of Looney Tunes, MGM, and Disney animated product. Those people are pretty much gone now. They seemed to care about the job they were doing and there fewer screw-ups (poorly authored video releases, edited TV versions of films instead of the original theatrical release) on the home video releases than there have been since the DVD era. I don't know that there are enough people left under 40 that actually care for this stuff anymore let alone are aware of the existence of these films or which companies the characters belong to. A lot of times the projects happen because a small group of people are there at the right time and have the enthusiasm to bother to collect these films together and do deluxe releases on home video. Like I've said all along, half the reason a bunch of home video releases don't do well is because they're not being shown anywhere on TV -- let alone the Net -- and not enough people that would care to own copies on home video have ever seen these films, either! There's still tons of films that never got quality releases on DVD or Blu ray... a lot of them had VHS releases and a few got onto laserdisc but haven't been seen on home video since.